Chapter Text
First years were given Friday afternoons off, so John waited outside the Great Hall and rounded up his friends as they came out after lunch. The roved about the school in a cluster, too busy looking around to talk much until they found an empty classroom and filed inside.
“That was strange, yesterday, right?” John asked, looking at Linda.
“Apparently people from Slytherin are racist against people who can’t do magic,” Linda said, “or people think they are. There was a some crying, it wasn’t clear.”
“Well that sure explains a very strange conversation I had,” said Kelly.
John turned to look at her, but she just shrugged.
“Relax,” said Kelly, “someone, who’s name I haven’t bothered to learn made a very strange remark and now I understand why everyone was so eager to distract me.”
“That would rule out it being a Slytherin thing,” Linda noted.
“I’m over this Houses thing,” said Sam. “It was fun for about seven seconds. And now I’d like to be able to decide where I sit.”
John thought it all seemed a bit bigger than they were making it, but he didn’t want to be the one who brought it up, so he just nodded and said, “well, still no harder than non-magical class, we’ll have lots of free time.”
Kelly laughed.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t think the tables thing is actually a rule, I’m pretty sure its just a thing, so I say we sit wherever we like, and see what happens.”
“Should we maybe get through a full week before antagonizing the staff?” Fred suggested, “just in case it is a rule.”
“Mmmmmm,” said Kelly, “fine. One week.”
She slugged Fred on the shoulder and they tussled a bit, but it only lasted until Fred ended up dumped onto the floor and they remembered they were on a stone floor.
“Speaking of,” said Kelly, while Fred rubbed his hip and winced embarrassedly, “I have belt exams to pass and so I need to find somewhere to practice.”
“Maybe there’s a spell that makes floors soft,” Sam suggested.
As soon as she mentioned it John suddenly realized how few chances to actually move around he’d had for the past four days.
“Its still warm,” he suggested, “we can just go outside and and find a mat later.”
A lot of the older students were in class, so they were alone except for the portraits on the wall when they made their way down to the entrance hall and outside. It was starting to get cool, but they were all heavily dressed, and they found a corner of the grounds by the side of the castle where they could tumble around. It felt nice to move and run around and John could stop thinking about this weird new place full of weird new people with rules they wouldn’t talk about.
They didn’t talk too much after that. John comprehensively failed to stop Kelly from pinning him to the ground in an arm lock no matter what he tried, so she probably didn’t actually have to worry about passing her exam at Christmas. They kept going until they all wore themselves out, then flopped over on the grass. John moved over so he was next to Linda and they could talk quietly.
“Are you sure everything’s alright,” he asked her.
“If they don’t like me I just won’t talk to them,” she said, “I don’t care. Why are you planning to murder the history teacher.”
“I can’t murder him,” said John, “he’s already a ghost. I’m going to exorcise him, so they’ll hire someone who knows how to teach history correctly.”
“I’m sure that will go exactly to plan,” said Linda.
“I think exorcism probably counts as ghost murder,” said Fred, dropping down next to them, “personally, I’m planning to ignore the whole class and wait for you to tell me about it.”
“What if I’ve ignored the whole class too?” John asked, “the one we had was pretty horrific.”
“You’ll know it anyway, I’ve met you,” said Fred, “we can all sleep through it and you can tell us later.”
“I guess,” said John, but the idea did make him feel better, “actually I’ll do that. Coming.”
Finding the library was a much bigger adventure than getting outside from the empty classroom had been.
They were half-way up a staircase to the third floor, when the staircase gave an alarming groan, pivoted ninety degrees, and connected to a totally different hallway with a thud. They turned to get back to where they’d originally meant to go, and found that that lead them to a classroom where a group of older students were practicing something that involved a casting a lot of brightly coloured lights over something that looked like a old, dented astrolabe.
“This building is made of nonsense,” Kelly whispered delightedly, as they backed away.
They ended up backtracking, finding a second stair case up to the forth floor, and trying to cut across, couldn’t find a way back down (the staircases had moved again) and had to get directions from a portrait of five fat monks, that might have been a joke because they involved travelling up to the sixth floor, cutting through a huge empty room with beautiful stain-glass windows that John mentally filed away for later use, and then travelling back down to the other side of the third floor via three different staircases.
The library was a storybook library to match the storybook castle. Huge, with vaulted ceilings and rows and rows of shelves of heavy, leather-bound books.
“I’ll start on the history books, if you guys start on the potions and transfiguration notes,” John said, and wandered into the stacks.
The library might be beautiful, but it was also the least organized library in the world. There was a hanging sign indicating the history books, but the books didn’t seem to be organized beyond that. They weren’t organized by topic, or author. Zhagreb’s History of the Giant Wars was squeezed onto an overfull shelf between Miller’s Wizarding Households in the 1790s and Ashcroft’s Recent Developments in Potion-making. He pulled the last one down, to see if it might be useful for their potions homework, checked the publication dates, and found that ‘recent’ meant the 1940s, and put it back. This seemed to be an ongoing problem with the collection. He pulled out volume after volume of ‘recent’ history that all ended before the first world war.
Eventually, he mentally declared defeat and went to find the librarian.
The Hogwarts librarian was a very thin woman with her hair drawn severely back from her face, who glowered at him when he walked up to her desk.
“‘Scuse me,” John started, “do you have a cataloguing system I could look through.”
“What are you looking for?” she asked cooly.
“Medieval history,” John said, “and the cataloguing system.”
“I’m hardly going to let some nasty little boy go rifling through my catalogue, dirtying things and putting them out of order,” she hissed.
She got up from behind the desk, stalked back into the far end of the history section, and pulled out three large books and handed them to John, in a way that suggested this was all a huge imposition.
“Thanks,” John said to her retreating back.
She didn’t respond.
He went back to their table, where everyone else was already writing out pages of notes.
“We decided to split these,” Sam “we can each do a subject, then switch notes. You’re stuck doing history because its a horrible subject and we outvoted you.”
“Okay,” said John, already leafing through his pile of books, “have none of these people heard of timelines?”
Faced with piles of outdated old text to wade through John went back to his original textbook, and started rewriting the chapter they had gone over in class which was, at least, more organized than Professor Binn’s mumbled summaries.
“The school lets us borrow owls right?” he said, once he’d finished the chapter, “because I need to compare this to some normal history. Those are done by the way,” he added, waving at the notes.
“Oh hey,” said Kelly, grabbing them, “they make sense now, we’re saved.”